Fourteen English department faculty members have been granted research leaves for all or part of the 2015-16 academic year, under Fordham's competitive Faculty Fellowship program. We're pretty sure that this extraordinary number is an all-time high for our department, and it may be a record for any department at Fordham.

And what a range of research projects Fordham's Office of Research will be supporting! Their geographical scope includes Europe and the Near East, Tanganyika and Tanzania, Great Britain and North America. The historical periods covered range from medieval to Victorian to contemporary. The themes researchers will be exploring include the black body, economic and political development, homelessness, love, modernity, pilgrimage, riots, travel, tourism, and upward mobility. The forms of culture they will analyze include broadsides, drama, films, grave markers, illustrations, music, novels, plays, and poetry. The methodologies and theories being brought to bear on these texts include affect studies, critical race studies, cultural studies, disability studies, genre studies, performance studies, philology, and postcolonial studies. This is what the research agenda of a great English department looks like.